PE1_iMovie

Organization 

iMovie is quite a product. In an age where people are creating more and more of their own presentation media, iMovie is the perfect companion for beginners and amateur experts. There are a few characteristics that make iMovie extremely user friendly. The first is the fact that it is a single screen application.

Nearly all of the major video importing and editing takes place on this single page. The page is broken into four major panes: the event library (lower left), event browser (lower right), project pane (upper left) and viewer pane (upper right). There is a tool bar that runs between the upper and lower panes and another at the bottom that hold buttons for some of the most commonly used functions such as resizing, volume and tagging.

One of the most basic and essential parts of the iMovie software is its method of organization. A beginner may not think that being able to organize media is necessary, but as the number of video files increase, one will recognize it is essential.  The pane dedicated to the event library can be organized in a couple different ways. The simplest, for a beginner, is to organize by date and through iPhoto. Because most beginners, including myself, don’t have a whole lot of footage, using the external drives feature is not necessary. In the top right corner of the event library pane, there is an option to show all the drives associated with the computer.  One would imagine that an amateur expert would have a lot more video clips to organize and would necessitate additional storage.

The other really cool way of organizing the video clips is through rating and tagging with keywords. Rating is a rather simple process of highlighting a clip and simply clicking on either the “Favorite” button in the middle tool bar, a solid star icon, or by clicking on the “Reject” button in the middle tool bar which is aptly designed as an “X”. 

What may prove to be an even better way to keep track of video clips is to tag them with keywords. For example, if there were several clips from the course of a school year in a teacher’s computer, one might set up different word tags to organize the clips. The teacher could tag certain clips with “In class”, “Field trip”, “Presentation”, “Art”, etc. By tagging video clips in this way, any amateur could begin to really organize their media.

Rating or tagging is really only useful when it delivers something back to the user though. Conveniently, iMovie does exactly that. On the bottom tool bar, there is a drop down menu that allows the user to view rated clips (favorite only, rejected only, etc). There is also a button with the image of a magnifying glass which allows the user to search via the keyword tags.

All said, the organizational structure of iMovie is one of its best assets for both beginners and burgeoning experts alike!

Regards